As we look to God’s Word, one brief quote comes to mind from Oswald Chambers today. He said that “eyes that look are common and eyes that see are rare.” Something for us to ponder as we look together in God’s Word. If you want to follow with your pew Bible, it’s on page 878, but you can also look from your bulletin as we read from Luke 19. He entered Jericho and was passing through, and behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich.
And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd, he could not because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him, for He was about to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today. So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, he has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.
Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. Jesus said to him, today Salvation has come to this house, since he is also a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost. This is the word of the Lord. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the blessing that you give us your word and that you reveal yourself. Please, Lord God, today may you reveal who you are in a new way. To us as we listen to your word. In Christ’s name we pray.
Amen. My wife and I recently had the joy of attending a wedding, and on the way, on the flight there to Colorado, next to us there was— across the aisle there was a young woman, and she had two young kids with her, and she had all of the tricks to keep them occupied on our bumpy adventure. She had the iPads, she had the toys. But then right in front of that row, across from us as well, was a young couple, and they had a young son who was about 3. And so when you have kids in that close proximity, it creates this perfect storm of wonderful chaos.
And what was fun to watch is this boy in front, he would jump up on the back of the seat every few minutes or so just to see what those other kids were doing, and he would say, “Hi, how are you? My name is—” And I thought, wow, isn’t that neat how God has made children with such wonder and joy? And how sad it is that we as adults, we’re not that way. We don’t get onto the plane and jump up and say, “Hi, how are you? My name is…” We’ve lost some of that curiosity and lost some of that wonder.
And we see some of that wonder and curiosity today in this Gospel of Luke. And for context, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He’s going through Jericho. And he had just healed a blind beggar. He had given him his sight, and so this now-seeing man was along with the crowd rejoicing together, and they were excited that something amazing was about to happen.
Something good was among them. And yet with all these hopeful expectations that they had, they were all grounded in various assumptions and desires. Some of these hopeful expectations wanted people— they wanted God to affirm what they were doing. They wanted the stamp of approval that God was saying, “Yeah, you guys are doing good. You’re being religious in all the right ways.” And some people in the crowd, they were looking for a Messiah.
Not just someone who’d come and save them from their sins, but someone to rule and reign and to free them from the oppressive Romans. And even among these crowd— the crowd there, there were some that They considered themselves unworthy, unaccepted. But they were curious. Who is this Jesus who heals the blind and makes the lepers healed and makes the lame walk again? And yet, there was a cynicism as well.
They already knew God had come to save. They knew the Scriptures. The religious people knew God’s law and they thought They knew exactly what God would and couldn’t do. They had him all figured out and he was in a box. And if we’re honest, we too can reflect some of the characters in this story in our life.
Maybe like some of the people there, we can sense our not-approvedness or not-enoughness when we’re on the outside of the inside crowd. Maybe if we’re on social media, we think that we’re not looksmaxing enough to mog the person next to us. And if you don’t know what that is, ask someone who’s a Gen Z. They’ll tell you, and then you can tell me, because I actually have no idea what that means.
Uh, maybe, maybe we think we’re too slow or we’re too short, or fill in the blank. What is the thing that we’re missing to really be acceptable, to really be sufficient enough for God or for other people? You know, and if we’re honest with our hearts, sometimes we believe Maybe actually we’re proud and we think, “I actually do have what it takes,” and maybe just people don’t see it. And we think that we have all that we need to know or that we know what’s gonna happen. And what’s interesting is the crowd here is saying, “These scriptures, these are the scriptures and they tell us the way.” And that like the people in the story, we often can be cynical and skeptical to the possibility of God doing something out of the box, something amazing.
So the question I have is, why is there skepticism and cynicism in our world? Why is that a normal part of our human experience? If we go back to the beginning, if we go back to when God created creation, he made it good, he put Adam and Eve in the garden with him to dwell with him, to be accepted, to walk with him, to have full acceptance, no barriers, no shame, And yet, even in the midst of that beautiful love and purpose, what happened? Humans chose doubt. We chose skepticism.
We, we thought we could not trust the one who created all things good, the Creator, but we trusted in the creation. And because of that, because of sin, that has brought a cloud over our experience, a cloud over our our lives, and instead of experiencing true joy and acceptance, we experience skepticism and cynicism. We’re skeptical of others, we’re skeptical of God, we’re skeptical of everyone around us, and like the smoke-covered mountains, we can look, but we’re not really seeing. But the good news is, is that even in our lack of ability to see, God doesn’t abandon us there. He doesn’t allow us and leave us to wander in blindness forever.
He didn’t— he wasn’t a God who wound up the world and spun it away and said, well, good luck, have fun. He actually had a plan to rescue us and pull us out of darkness. And in this passage, what’s interesting is what we hear Jesus say is his purpose and who he is, that he came to earth and he came to rescue the lost. And many people throughout history, they have assumptions about Jesus. We have assumptions about who he is from from other people, from our own experience, we might think he’s a good teacher.
He’s a good moral teacher. He has lessons that he can tell us of how to live, or he’s done miracles. But in the Gospel of Luke, he reveals who he is and what he is doing, and that he’s rescuing us. He’s a God who seeks and rescues his people. And because God reveals himself, we can see him.
And when we see him, we can experience true change and true hope. So we’re gonna look at 3 characters in our passage today. First, the curious climber, and second, the cynical crowds, and lastly, the compelling Christ. And if you want to follow with me, first, as we look at this curious climber, I’m going to read again from the beginning of Luke 19. Behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus.
He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way.
I like that phrase, the rich man Zacchaeus, he was trying to see who Jesus was. He was trying to take a look at Jesus’s character. You know, if we were to go back in the previous chapter, chapter 18 of Luke, we would see another rich ruler. We see this other rich young man who came to see Jesus, and yet he had a radically different experience when he encountered Jesus. When he went to Jesus, he was very moral and upstanding, and he had this expectation.
And Jesus met him and he challenged him. He said, “Give away your money to the poor.” And that rich young man went away sad, the scriptures say, because he had a lot of money and he did not want to walk away from that security. And money can do that sometimes. We can often think money makes us not need anyone. We don’t need a savior.
If we have money, then I don’t need anyone else. I can take care of myself. It protects us. It insulates us from feeling powerless, and it makes us feel that we have an illusion of independence. Money says, “I don’t need a relationship with someone.” to survive any trials because I can afford whatever is needed when trouble comes.
But Zacchaeus here, also a rich man, is doing something very strange. You know, we would expect for a rich man— when you think about a rich man in the community, you know, insert your favorite billionaire here— they don’t have to fight their way through a crowd. In fact, when they show up, usually there’s a red carpet that rolls out and people would afford them the space and the respect of their position. You know, a chief tax collector would be a very wealthy man, a tax collector of tax collectors. But imagine for a moment what people saw when they looked at Zacchaeus.
They were living in this occupied country, occupied by the Romans, and here was someone who was a Jew just like them, and yet instead of supporting them, he was taking their money and giving it to to the foreigners that were ruling over them. There was no one in that crowd who was gonna open up for Zacchaeus. In fact, one commentator said if Zacchaeus got into that crowd, he might have found a knife in his back before he actually arrived at Jesus. But he also, curiously, might not have wanted to get close to Jesus because he might have heard what had happened with the other rich young men. He might have said, “I don’t want to go talk to that guy.
He’s gonna ask me to give away all my money. So I’m just gonna stay on the outside. I’m just gonna see what I can see.” So he climbs up this tree to get a peek, and the text says he wanted to see who Jesus was. He wanted to see who Jesus was, to see who was this man that everyone was talking about. The rich young ruler came to Jesus with an agenda in mind.
He had expectations. He was looking for something to be declared right for all his hard work, and he was looking for validation. And Zacchaeus was coming just to see who is Jesus. So how about you and I? Who do we identify more with in this story?
Do we identify with the rich young man? Do we come to Jesus and say, Jesus, justify me, make me right? Do we have an agenda when we go to God, or do we really just want to see? Who is he? Who is this Jesus?
What do we hold on to when we go to Jesus? And where are our eyes focused today? Is it possible we’re looking, we’re not seeing, to miss what’s in front of us? The fact that God himself, the one who made the stars in the universe, would come to earth and walk among us is pretty amazing. But the good news is God reveals himself so that we can see him, and when we see him We are changed.
Yet this crowd was pretty skeptical. They were even cynical. Looking now at the crowds in verse 7, they saw Jesus interacting with the tax collector and their reaction was, they all saw it and he has gone to be— they all grumbled, excuse me, he has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner. They were talking among themselves, And they were saying essentially this thing: What is going on? Why is he doing this?
Why would he go to be with a sinner? And essentially there was two things that were shocking to them. One of them is Zacchaeus is totally not a worthy guy to go have dinner with. He’s a sinner. And the other thing that was underneath it all is that for them Jesus was disappointing their expectations.
Zacchaeus here was attempting to see who Jesus was, but the crowd already assumed who Jesus was. And the crowd, even those closest to Jesus, even those on, on the inside, they already had expectations about what he was going to do. He was going to Jerusalem, literally, to be the Messiah. And if we fast forward to the end of this chapter, chapter 19, we see this beautiful picture: Jesus coming in in a triumph into Jerusalem on a donkey, and everybody’s screaming Hosanna! God saves!
Everyone’s excited their Messiah has come. He had healed the blind, he had fed the 5,000. He was our guy. We’re gonna make this guy king. We’re gonna put him on a throne.
And so as this throng of people is moving towards Jerusalem, they had this gathered excitement and they thought, wow, we have our king. They thought they already knew who he was. They didn’t need him to fill in the blanks or give them a timeout and say, hey guys, I think you might have the wrong conclusions about me. There was something that Jesus did though in that moment that was completely out of character. You know, Nicholas McDonald wrote a book called The Light in Our Eyes.
It’s about deconstruction and disillusionment, and I highly recommend it. But he talks about this process of disillusionment and deconstruction that happens to people. And he tells this story which I love because I can relate with it. I’ve never been there myself. He wanted to go to Disney World.
And so all his life he’s thought, man, someday I’m gonna go to Disney World. And of course when he marries his wife, unfortunately she had worked at Disney World growing up. So in her early 20s, she spent a lot of time behind the scenes seeing the seedy underbelly of Disney World, seeing how this proverbial sausage is made and had no desire to go back. All the magic had been worn off and she said, no, I do not want to go to Disney World. Disney World.
And because when you’re in Disney World, the number one rule is you never take your mask off, because if you do, that’s gonna shatter some kid’s reality. They’re gonna say, whoa, what is going on? Why is there a Mexican guy under Princess Ariel? Or whatever.
In, in essence, if you’ll allow, the crowd here is literally rubbing their eyes looking at Jesus like he just took off his Messiah mask.
He wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do. And even though they had a front-row seat to see everything that he had done, they didn’t even understand who he really was. They thought they already knew. And what’s also true is we see in the Gospels that the disciples were in the same boat. They were coming to Jesus, and when he was telling them, “I am going to die and be raised in 3 days,” and they said, “What?” What?
They didn’t understand.
They assumed a lot about who God was. And like them, we can often do the same thing. We’ve built a picture of who God is in our mind through seeing other Christians or through seeing what we see in social media or growing up a collage of our parents’ belief or our friends or our teachers in school. It’s the crowd that often tells us what to believe about God. And it says this, the message is God loves good people and he hates bad people.
It’s pretty simple. God loves the people I love and he hates the people I’d hate. It’s very easy. But when Jesus reveals who he really is, the crowd doesn’t adjust its conclusions, but instead they double down. And where Zacchaeus wanted to see, the crowd thought they already saw.
We should ask ourselves, what is the picture that we’re painting of God, who he is in our mind? Does he love the people we love and hate the people we hate? Or is that an idea that we’ve inherited from the crowd? And Jesus surprises us because God reveals himself. Who God is, His true character is revealed in Christ.
And when He reveals Himself and we see Him, we are changed. So let’s look now at what Christ does with Zacchaeus. Scripture says that when Jesus saw the man in the tree, He said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” And I want to look at 3 things that Christ reveals about Himself here: His initiation, His invitation, and His imminence, or His nearness. So Christ initiates to Zacchaeus. He doesn’t wait for Zacchaeus to come up to him.
He says he came to seek and save the lost. And if it was up to us to initiate, we wouldn’t seek God. We would do a million other things than try to find God. Yet he reveals that he is a seeking and saving God. And we— when we don’t— we don’t earn his favor.
And then he comes to us. Well, looks like you finished your checklist, now I can come and hang out with you. No, he initiates, he seeks us, he comes to us. And that’s how we are, often lost and in a tree. And second, Christ invites Zacchaeus to host him.
I will come to your house, I’m gonna stay at your house. And I don’t know about you, but in our society, we find that very rude, maybe offensive if someone comes to us and says, I’m gonna come to your house for dinner and stay over. We might be offended by that, but in, in the Middle Eastern culture, it’s actually a great honor to host someone. It’s an honor to have someone come to your house. So in fact, you cannot ask someone to come to your house because in fact you would be asking them to honor you, which would be foolish to do.
So Jesus is doing a very Middle Eastern culture thing. He’s honoring Zacchaeus, saying, “I will come to your house. I will stay with you.” The crowd was looking at Zacchaeus like a billionaire jerk. Can I say that? And he didn’t want to have anything— they didn’t want to have anything to do with Zacchaeus at all.
He was a thief. He was a traitor. But Jesus spoke volumes by saying, “I will be with you. You are accepted. I will come to your house.
And lastly, the thing that Christ does is he comes near. He’s imminent. He’s close. And actually, this is the scariest thing, I think. It’s a scary thought to think of getting too close to someone.
We don’t like to get close to people naturally. We think, hey, if someone comes too close, what if they reject us? What if they hurt us? What if they— They pretend to be nice, but when they come in, they’re like, “Eh,” and then they leave. Zacchaeus was keeping his distance, climbing a tree, just wanting to see from the outside.
He wasn’t pushing himself through the crowd, and yet God came near to him. Not just near to him to speak to him, but, “I’m gonna even sit with you. I’m gonna dine with you. I’m gonna stay with you.” That’s what God does. Christ initiates.
Accepts us. He comes near to us through the cross, through his work, and it’s radically different from anything else in the world. And today, when we think about acceptance, it’s something that everyone longs for. In fact, acceptance is what we demand as humans. We say, you have to accept me for who I am.
You have to just accept me for the person that I am. And we, we demand that everyone affirms who we are without requiring us to change at all. Zacchaeus doesn’t do that. He doesn’t hop down out of the tree and say, “Look everybody, Jesus is coming to my house.” He says, “It’s totally cool if I cheat you guys and steal from you and tax you exorbitant fees.” He’s not saying and demanding that he’s accepted when Jesus accepts him. No, something else happens.
When he sees God, his love and acceptance works in his heart. The same is true for us. When we see God, When God accepts us, our hearts change. The Holy Spirit changes us from the inside out. When we truly see who God is in Christ, we change.
Now, many of us would be terrified if, if Jesus came to our house. We would be terrified maybe if Jesus invited himself in. You know, even Peter, one of the disciples, his first experience with Jesus was on a boat. And when he saw and realized this is not just some dude When Jesus changed— when Jesus caused all the— Peter to catch all these fish, Peter’s first reaction is, “Get away from me, I’m a sinful man.” The nearness of God is scary. God’s love is terrifying.
Why? Because we expect and assume God to be a judgmental God. We expect God to be one who has a checklist for us, but the fact that God showed up and instead of doing that, he was merciful and gracious and kind. That can be scary. We want a God who’s judgmental, who punishes those we dislike and gives approval to the people that we like.
But God actually reveals himself as one who gives grace to the sinner. And Zacchaeus sees Jesus looking up at him. He sees the face of love. He sees full acceptance and mercy. He sees the King of Glory looking up at at him saying, I wanna come to your house, come on down.
I wanna be with you, I wanna be near you. And suddenly Zacchaeus doesn’t need his money anymore. He doesn’t need all those things that he’s holding onto for security in this world that never really satisfy anyways. It just all goes away. Immediately he says, I’ll give it away.
I will restore what I’ve stolen, because it didn’t matter anymore. When God reveals himself, Zacchaeus is truly changed. He didn’t hold on to his assumptions about who God was. He just stared up— he stared down and saw the God of love. So the question is, whatever assumptions we have, what are the assumptions we are holding on to about who God is?
Is? What are our cynical judgments about what he can or cannot or should do for us? God is coming to us, and God is asking us to see him today. And maybe you’re here today in a painful situation, like the hymn said, a soul is weary. Maybe you’re hurting and suffering in silence and feeling like you’re on the outside of being accepted that you’re not worthy of God even looking up at you.
The hymn writer from the hymn that we just sang said, “To turn our eyes to Jesus, and as we do, the things of this world will grow faintly dim in the light, in the eyes of His glory and grace.” I wanna, I wanna say that Jesus Loving Zacchaeus wasn’t a fluke of his character. It wasn’t an abnormal blip on his way to Jerusalem. He was looking up at Zacchaeus as joyful as, I would say, a child bouncing on the back of the seat of the plane. Because he knew he was gonna climb up on that tree. He knew he was on his way to die for Zacchaeus’ sin.
He knew he was going to be the one to pay the penalty for all that Zacchaeus had ever done. And Zacchaeus saw that salvation in Christ’s eyes. His Savior resurrected to give him life and ascended to give him his Spirit and glory. This is the Christ who calls us to look at him. This is the Christ who sent us on mission to be like him, his eyes, his hands, his feet in the world, to see those who are peering from the outside wondering who this Jesus is, and to show them that face of grace and love.
Even if it means moving towards suffering, even if it means we know that we’re moving towards persecution, we are called to be the aroma of Christ wherever we go, revealing God just as he revealed himself. And as we look at Christ we will be changed. Let’s pray.
Father God, King Jesus, Holy Spirit, we give you thanks and praise for not abandoning us into a world of shadows and darkness and blindness. And just as you healed the blind beggar on the road and gave him sight, you gave sight to Zacchaeus, a sight of a God who loves people. You love the sinner, and you not only love the sinner, but you change us from the inside out so that we can know your love and we can become more like you. If there’s anyone here today, God, I pray that they would be able to turn their eyes to you and to receive that same sight and to receive that healing. We pray all these things in the glorious name of Jesus.
Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.